After the Downfall

He did succeed in surprising Aderno, anyhow. Aderno’s eyes were almost as blue as Velona’s, but Hasso wouldn’t have called them beautiful. Haughty struck him as a much better word. “Do the wizards in your world guard their secrets so closely, then?” Aderno asked, sounding … jealous? “You don’t even know what the Laws are?”

“You don’t get it,” Hasso said. “We haven’t got any wizards. Till I sat down on the Omphalos, I didn’t believe in magic. We’ve got scientists. We’ve got factories.” He wondered how the translation spell would handle those two words.

“If that were so, I would call you as mindblind as the Grenye,” Aderno said. “But you saw gold, so I know this cannot be true.” He frowned, studying Hasso like an entomologist looking at a new species of flea through a magnifying glass. “Maybe the very laws of your world are different, forbidding magic or making it difficult.”

“Maybe.” Hasso shrugged. He neither knew nor cared – and he didn’t want to go back and experiment. An Ivan with an evil temper would plug him if he did. He glanced over at Velona. No, he didn’t have the words yet … but one of these days he would. In the meantime, he was stuck with the wizard. “Tell me about these Laws, then.”

“You truly do not know of the Laws?” Aderno asked, and Hasso shook his head. They happened to be riding past a Grenye farm. The Lenello wizard waved towards it. “Without them, without being able to use them, we would live like that.”

The farm put Hasso in mind of what he’d seen in Russia. If anything, it was even more backward, even more disorderly. The man of the family was chopping wood. Every few strokes, he would swig from a jug. Hasso wouldn’t have wanted to get lit up while swinging an axe, but the peasant didn’t seem to care. He paused to bow as the Lenelli went by, then attacked the wood with fresh ferocity.

His wife was weeding in the vegetable plot by the shabby, thatch – roofed farmhouse. Her butt stuck up in the air. Aderno mimed swatting it. Hasso chuckled. He and his men had played those games with peasant women. Some of the gals liked it. Others … Well, too bad for them.

A swarm of children, from almost grown to barely past toddling, worked around the farm. A boy with a beard just starting to sprout tended a handful of pigs in a stinking muddy wallow. He also bowed to his overlords. Hasso didn’t like the look in his eye when he straightened.

A girl a year or two younger tossed grain to some chickens. She might have been pretty if you fattened her up and scrubbed off a lifetime’s worth of dirt. Would anyone ever bother? Would it ever occur to anyone that he ought to bother? Hasso didn’t think so.

“You think these are bad, you should see the wild ones,” Aderno said. “These are partway civilized, or at least tamed. They know better than to yap at their betters, anyhow.”

Hasso wasn’t so sure of that. He cared for the way the peasant swung the axe no more than he liked the smoldering fury in the youth’s eyes. They might be cowed, but they seemed a long way from tame. And … “Those bastards who were chasing Velona – they were wild?”

“Wild, yes,” Aderno answered. “Without magic. Without hope of magic. Too stupid, too mindblind, to harness the Laws of Similarity and Contagion.”

There. Hasso finally had names for the Two Laws. Names alone didn’t help much, though. “What do they mean?” he asked.

Aderno clucked like a mother hen. He really couldn’t believe Hasso didn’t know. Plainly giving him the benefit of the doubt, the wizard said, “Well, you’re still a stranger here.” He might have been reminding himself. “The Law of Similarity says that an image is similar to its model, and if you do something to the image, the same thing will happen to the model. Actually connecting them in a magical way is more complicated, but that’s the idea. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” Hasso said. Gypsies and other frauds used the same notions in the world he knew, but they didn’t really work there. Here… Well, who could say? What was he doing here if magic was nothing but a load of crap? “And the Law of, uh, Contagion?”

“An obvious truth: that things once in contact remain in contact – in a mystical sense, of course,” Aderno replied.

“Aber naturlich” Hasso said dryly. And if that wasn’t real, pure, one hundred percent bullshit … then maybe it was something else.

“Little by little, we use our magic – and our strong right arms – to teach the Grenye that even dreaming of standing against us is far beyond their feeble abilities,” Aderno said. “Sooner or later, they will learn.”

“That would probably be good,” Hasso said. All the same, he wished he had eyes in the back of his head, a wish he’d also had many times in Russia. The squat, dark men who’d been chasing Velona hadn’t learned their lesson yet – he was sure of that. And, thanks to his Schmeisser, they never would now.